AI Agents, Economic Shifts, and Delivery Solutions in Wholesale Distribution

[00:00:04] Welcome to Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by LeadSmart Technologies, Tom, Kevin, and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents, and the global wholesale supply chain.

[00:00:24] Whether it's M&A, SaaS and cloud computing, B2B e-commerce, or supply chain issues, we peel back the onion with our guests into the topics that impact your business the most. Good morning. What's happening? Another Friday. Yeah, haven't seen you in two days. I know, a long time. Yeah, nice to spend the day with you on Wednesday and escaping all of the fires here in Southern California.

[00:00:53] Hopefully we get a little rain this weekend and calm things down a bit, huh? That's the rumor. We'll see. I'll believe it when I see it. I felt bad for you Wednesday leaving San Diego and having to get back up to Ventura with fires going on around you and traffic freeways closed and craziness. So, but you're here. I'm here. Very good. All right. Why don't we dive right in? Yeah, we've got a lot to do today. So we've got some cool stuff to talk about today too.

[00:01:23] Not that we don't every week, but I'm still a little bit, I still have a little bit of last Friday's podcast hangover though with the legends as people called them, the Mount Rushmore of wholesale distribution with Mike Marks and Ian Heller and Dirk Beveridge joined us for our yearly event of looking back at 2024 and looking ahead at the highlights that could be happening. What's happening in 2025.

[00:01:50] So if you weren't with us last week and you're here with us today, easy to just jump on the YouTube or LinkedIn and just go to the lead smart technologies page there and you'll have the recordings from last week. If you're listening on the podcast, then certainly check out last week's episode because that's not one to be missed. Or if you're at the bottom of the newsletter, you can just click the link. If you get the newsletter, great. So you don't have to think it's easy. It's easy. Yeah, that's exactly right. So let's dive into this. I'm Kevin Brown.

[00:02:20] I'm here with Tom Burton. Tom is my lifelong friend and co-founder of lead smart technologies. Tom and I get together every Friday morning, oftentimes with great guests, as we just referenced. And we go through and look at the news of the week, both in North America and around the world. And we bring important points together in a newsletter that we publish each week. And that's called around the horn and wholesale distribution. Three simple ways to get that.

[00:02:47] If you don't already get it, you can do that by just sending an email to us at hello at lead smart tech dot com and we'll get you signed right up. You can go to the around the horn and wholesale distribution spotlight page on LinkedIn. A big part of our audience is on LinkedIn. So if you're on LinkedIn, just type in in the search bar around the horn and wholesale distribution will bring you right to the page. You can follow the show. You can follow lead smart and you can sign up for the newsletter. It'll come to your email.

[00:03:17] It'll come to your LinkedIn feed each day as well. Early Friday mornings. And then finally, we have a website for the podcast. It's called around the horn pod dot com. Www dot around the horn pod dot com. You can see past episodes there. You can subscribe to the newsletter. You can subscribe to a bunch of podcast feeds there. Well, our goal is to take that news and look at how it impacts wholesale distribution.

[00:03:43] So we talk about things like today we're talking a little bit about tariffs and the economy relating that back to wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We've got a section for manufacturing and for distribution for supply chain for marketing and e-commerce, A.I. technology. So we pull all of these things together and with our guests when we have when we talk about how that impacts wholesale distribution.

[00:04:05] The beauty is if you're with us live on LinkedIn, live YouTube, live or Facebook live, you can pop a comment in and share with us what your thoughts are about what we're doing. And it's great to see our friend Brian Conley that's there. Wow, that was nice, Brian. Last Friday's call was awesome. Thank you for that. We've got an exciting webinar that we're going to announce the next couple of days on some of the impacts of cybersecurity attacks on not just wholesale distribution, but their technology providers. So stand by for some news on that.

[00:04:34] So we've got some good stuff coming out about that and some separate webinars coming up. But if you're with us today, chime in, tell us where you're from and say hello. And if you have thoughts about what we're going to talk about, let us know. But again, we get together every week. Next week, we have Steven Levy from Infor is going to be joining us. He is very much a thought leader on technology and its relationship into wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So we're looking forward to that. Great lineup of guests for the coming year.

[00:05:04] So anything to add to that, Tom? Or do you want to kind of dive in? I think we should dive in. We should dive in. Yeah. So if you're listening in on the podcast, you won't see the newsletter. We have the newsletter up in front of us. We share some graphics here and there. So again, if you're listening on the podcast that's recorded, it'll be live later today on Friday. You can just simply sign up for that and you'll be able to see that or watch this event on YouTube or LinkedIn in the recorded session.

[00:05:34] So the IMF, International Monetary Fund, sharply rises 25 U.S. growth forecast. I'm not... Paul Kennedy is asking what a podcast hangover is. It's when you have too much fun the week before and then you have to come back and do it again the week later. I guess that's it. Yeah.

[00:05:55] I think what it is kind of, Paul, for me is my brain still hurts from trying to keep up with a medicated Mike Marks and then the wisdom from him and Dirk and even, Paul, some of your great comments last week. So that's it. Good morning, Matt. Murray, appreciate you being with us in Bend, Oregon. I bet it's a little bit chilly up there, but good for you to start. It's the rain down here. So yeah, that's right. It's coming south from there that we're supposed to see rain this week and I'll believe it when I see it.

[00:06:25] So, Tom, any quick thoughts on this updated economic forecast? You know, I mean, it was... We went away, Tom. We can't hear you. And I know you're saying something insightful. Can you hear me now? We can hear you now like a Verizon commercial. Okay. You know, I mean, obviously, you know, they're expecting some above, I guess, above forecast growth, slightly above forecast growth on the piece there.

[00:06:55] You know, they're saying global inflation is expected to ease, but it seems, and I know we're going to talk about tariffs and other things here in a minute, but it seems difficult for me to kind of put those two together is where we have more growth. We have certainly some pressure on prices and so forth. And that doesn't seem to be the recipe for inflation easing. But overall, I guess the forecast is pretty bullish.

[00:07:21] Yeah, well, you know, I think that a lot of this stuff is kind of telling me that globally there was a bit of an apprehension of looking at the U.S. economy until we got through the November elections. And I think part of that is what we're seeing here. A little bit of that discussion from the bigwigs that are in Davos, Switzerland this week, kind of some of the same bullishness that they're looking at right now as well.

[00:07:48] So I think that's a big part of what we're what we're kind of seeing with this. I looked at these and think, though, too, that, you know, we can see within another month we might see another adjustment to some of these things. But across the board, I think what we're seeing is there's maybe a little bit more of a bullish view of things with some growth opportunities that go with that.

[00:08:07] So, you know, we'll see what happens both with GDP, as they talk about a little bit in this as well, and then global inflation in the role that the U.S. plays in that as well. So it'll be an interesting one to watch. I think there's a chart with that. I was just kind of looking at it. They talked about give that. Did you grab that one? Yeah. I think so. I think so. Is that one? Yeah. So this kind of talks about economic outlook growth projections.

[00:08:36] It shows it by advanced economies and emerging economies. So I thought this was kind of interesting to look at. They talk about real GP and annual percentage change in this particular chart. So the estimate had been, you know, to 3.2% versus 3.3% and then another 3.3% in the U.S. in 26.

[00:09:00] But a little flatter in most other advanced economies that they're looking at with this as well. So something to consider. I think nobody still is talking about Doge and whether Doge will have any effect on GDP, which I can't imagine if you're cutting, you know, what they talk about anyway, or even partially of what they're talking about. It can have some impact, but no one talks about it. Yeah, that's a great point.

[00:09:27] And, you know, because where are we at? I think we talked a couple weeks ago, depending on which statistic you look at, somewhere between 25% and 33% of our budget right now in this country is tied to government workers and city, state, county, and federal. And when you start having some impact on some of the, maybe some of the fat that's in,

[00:09:55] and specifically in our federal government, that that could have an impact in changing things on the GDP. I did, though, Tom, before you jump ahead there is, and you might have cut this, you know, this was the big thing with the Department of Governmental Efficiency was we had Vivek Ramaswani who had run for president on the Republican ticket and, you know, a billionaire from the, I think, the pharmaceutical industry

[00:10:22] had developed some pharmaceuticals and so forth and sold off those companies. But he was going to be working with Elon Musk on all of this. But I thought I caught something earlier in the week that he's no longer involved. I don't believe he is, no. Yeah. And I think there's somebody else stepping in. Okay. I honestly haven't followed it, but he's going to go run for governor, I believe. Yeah, governor of Ohio. But that's a long time away. Yeah.

[00:10:50] And I'm wondering if there's already some discontent in that group that's supposed to be doing this. So I'll look into that a little bit. Maybe we can talk about that next week as well. But all of a sudden, let's just, I mean, what if they cut, you know, they're talking about wanting to cut $2 or $3 trillion out of the budget. Well, they just cut a half a trillion. $500 trillion out of the budget. It's meaningful, right? Yeah. And I think the other side of that is it'll be interesting to watch, too, is, you know,

[00:11:19] one of the initial presidential orders was the idea of getting everybody back to work. So when I was, I haven't been to D.C. I'd planned to be there next week. Some things came up. I'm not able to be there for the NAW event. But I was visiting with NAW and some other folks in D.C. last spring. And I was there on one of the days that no one was mandated to be in the office. And getting around downtown Washington, D.C. was just a breeze.

[00:11:49] And now with the return to work edict, I would assume that's going to pop with some productivity is going to increase as well. So that could be beneficial, too. So if you can have more productivity from the people you have and need less people and less groups, we should see some savings here. So I didn't see it. There was an executive order that was signed that everyone has to go back to the office? Okay.

[00:12:15] Well, yeah, a lot of the people had said they would not go back to the office. And that was one of the first cuts they were going to start making is people who wouldn't come back to the office. So this is the and it's no different than what, you know, in all of the Musk controlled companies and Amazon now it's this is where your job is. If you want to work here, come here. Well, a lot of government workers were literally coming in. They had to come in. They had one day a week. I know that they had to come in.

[00:12:44] Yeah, or somewhere even once a month if you were not local or whatever the case may be. So I'm sure that doesn't mean that they they don't have remote workers into different departments. But I think if you look at it at the end of the day is what you've got is the Beltway and all of the areas around there loaded with people who have probably I don't I don't know how you can be as efficient.

[00:13:09] I mean, there are a narrow band of people, I think, who are equally or maybe even more efficient working remotely, but the vast majority of people work get more done in a group environment. And the other part of it is you get group think then, right? You get the water cooler discussions about a project and so forth. So it'll be an interesting I think that's going to be some interesting fast fallout one way or the other. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I would agree.

[00:13:39] The let's jump ahead. So we've got some details. They're hardy the heating air conditioning refrigeration distributors organization. They've published some trends for their group within their organization and a little modest revenue dip there in November, but November had one fewer day. I think it was as well work day than normal. So it said they passed through the past year.

[00:14:04] They've seen inventories decline in sales to inventory ratio increase as distributors confidence and supply chain recover. So I think this is just a little bit of a hiccup along the way as we hopefully continue to see some confidence building. We've got to get around some of the supply chain issues there. And hopefully this port piece that we've got in place now will work out a little bit better. I didn't read it and I probably shouldn't even mention it, but I got an alert this morning

[00:14:33] that Eric Houghlin, the CEO of the National Association of Wholesalers, who's been on the show with us before and comments here and there. He came out this morning with some strong thoughts that we can talk about next week on needing to get to a place where the ports have more automation that's probably going to come out of this. So if you follow Eric, you'll probably be able to see his points and thoughts out of that. So, all right. So next article is from CNBC.

[00:14:59] Trump is considering a 10% tariff on China beginning as soon as February 1st. Any quick thoughts or takeaways on that before we dive deep, deep in it? Well, a couple of quick thoughts. So he is proposing 10% on China and 25%, I believe, on Mexico and Canada. But what I find interesting, at least what it says in here, is these are tariffs that are not necessarily based just on the economic aspects.

[00:15:29] They're almost punitive to the different areas because he doesn't like what they're doing, right? So it's like China, it says right here, we're talking a tariff of 10% on China based on the fact that they're sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada. And then the 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico is because they're letting people through the border or they're not doing good on their border. So those are not economic tariffs.

[00:15:55] Those are punitive tariffs based on the things that are actually, you know, that he wants to change, which I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with it. It's just an interesting, interesting concept. Well, I think, so thanks for sharing that. I think that's what we're looking at here. And I think this article just brings to us something, Tom, that is a much bigger picture situation that we have, right?

[00:16:22] You have an administration who was a president who was elected to change things and to bring a different type of thinking in. So whatever the margin of the win was, it was phenomenally or dramatically larger than anybody expected. And what the American people, again, I don't even want to say it's my line of thinking,

[00:16:52] but what we really see on this is the vast majority of people in this country that participated in the election don't want to continue the way that things have been going. It impacts whether it's the price of eggs or the price of milk or whatever it might be. They're getting hit in the pocketbook. Interest rates are high. And what they're saying is right, wrong or indifferent, the way these things get solved, I'm open and willing to a different way of doing things.

[00:17:21] And I think what we're seeing now, and I was talking to my wife about this last night, Darlene was watching the news after dinner. And, you know, President Trump is here in Southern California today to tour the fires. There was discussion because he hadn't confirmed whether he was going to go spend part of the day with a California governor and he was going to do or he's going to do this or all that. And, you know, Darlene commented, she goes, what a jerk, you know?

[00:17:49] And, and I told her, I said, you just, and we've had this discussion over and over again and it ties right into the tariffs. And specifically with China to your point, this fentanyl piece is what I'll get to here in a second is this is a guy that doesn't care what you think. He cares what he's going to bring for results. And if the results are important to you, that's fine. The protocols of the previous presidents or the way of doing things are irrelevant to him. And so now I think that's the key.

[00:18:19] Right. The protocols and the, what was considered to be maybe even politically correct in the past and how you navigated things is basically going out the window. Right. And this is being run more like a business where I just got to get stuff done. And this is the tactic or the strategy I'm going to use to get that thing done. And that's exactly right. And I think we're going to seeing this with China. We're seeing it with Mexico.

[00:18:46] We're going to see some of it with Canada where probably what's going on in California. And when he, you know, he happened to have been being interviewed by a far right wing person. And he said, you know, I don't know if we're going to send this emergency aid to California or not. That's kind of what got Darlene's, you know, higher up a little bit. And I said, here's what he's saying is Gavin Newsom, governor of California. I have some expectations of things, some things that you need to do and change and make better in California.

[00:19:13] And I'm going to tie that to some other things you need, which instead of doing it back room, like historically we see all the time, what he's just doing is saying, I'm putting it out in the public. And this is exactly what you described earlier is, you know, the United States does not want the fentanyl that's getting into this country that's being flooded into Latin America from China. And China, if you don't do something about that and all some of these other things that are important, this is what it means.

[00:19:41] And so it goes back to that in my mind. And I'll get off my soapbox here for a second. But I think it's wise, whether you like this administration, you like the style, you don't like the style. I think everybody that's paying attention to this would be wise to listen to Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investors comment on this, right? Don't take him literally, but take him very seriously.

[00:20:09] And so when you see these grandiose things that the typically biased news is bringing out in front of you, take a step back and think about what's behind what's going on. And I think we're seeing this with the China tariffs, to your point. There's a big piece of this to start with about fentanyl. Yeah. Right. And what, how many of us have not had some, either we know or we are friend of a friend

[00:20:36] has had somebody that's had an impact of fentanyl on their life? I mean, fentanyl is obviously a huge issue and it's a huge issue. I, it's just, it's an interesting strategy, right? Of using the tariffs, not because of, Hey, we need economic balance or we need to. It's one of many levers, right? Right. It's just, Hey, I don't like the way you're acting. So I'm going to find you a tariff. Um, and it will probably get attention.

[00:21:03] And as we talked about before, it will create conversation that hopefully will lead to an outcome that's, you know, is, is positive or at least workable on both sides. So I can hear my father sit the trash out on time without being asked, or there might be an impact to your allowance. Exactly. There you go. Right. Is there, there's my, there's my G Charlie Brown, uh, uh, from the day, but you know, the closing on that, I think it's important though. Uh, we talked about China.

[00:21:31] I was listening to a, uh, democratic lawmaker on CNBC earlier this week in part of the discussions about tariffs and the economy. And she made, and I wish I would have recorded it and kept it. She made a very, very important statement that I think we've talked about here a lot. And we're going to continue to is, you know, historically we've had NAFTA, right. And, uh, with Mexico, us and Canada, free trade and so forth.

[00:22:00] Uh, her comment was that she believes very quickly, we're going to need to start looking at our relationship with Canada and Mexico as completely separate relationships versus one. Of course. And we've talked here a lot. There's so much more impact that can happen of what's going on in Mexico than what's, uh, what's going on separately. So I think a good, a good thing to, uh, to be paying attention to is as I've said over

[00:22:29] and over again, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. All right. So we can, uh, we had another article in the newsletter. If you follow closely, some of the industry specifics and trade stuff going on is, uh, there's an article for an industrial supply magazine about November cutting tool orders. Some people in their business and distribution have paid very close attention to that. We published that here in this newsletter as well, but we're going to jump ahead to our manufacturing and distribution segment that we have Home Depot partners with DoorDash and

[00:22:59] Uber Eats to expand delivery. Yeah, I'm interested. So I have a take on that, but I'm very interested to hear maybe some of the audience that's listening what their take is on that. So it was, I struggle from a brand perspective to think that I would go on an app for Uber Eats and order stuff from Home Depot. Well, I think they probably would logistically do a good job. It just seems weird.

[00:23:30] And, you know, so obviously they've thought this through and they think this is another great customer experience channel to be able to have people order from Home Depot. And have it delivered in the same way you get your food delivered. Yep. Be great from Costco. I could have them deliver a hot dog and also some others. What's the difference? You know, but, um, I mean, literally what's the difference of if you go to smart cart or another delivery, like

[00:23:59] I, when Darlene and I were both really sick last month, I went to, um, Amazon Fresh and had two deliveries one day because we, I forgot to order something. So we got a second delivery. Was the experience optimal? No, it wasn't actually that good, but I got what I needed. I got the cough syrup. I got the extra aspirin and we got some food.

[00:24:22] And, um, so changing that to I'm on a job site and, uh, I need, um, you know, four more boxes of screws and, um, this, that, and the other is probably going to be something that's going to happen. Yeah. So you're, you're not with us, Tom. Okay. How about now? For a guy that runs the technology side of a software company, your microphone, it sounds

[00:24:51] good when it's here, but that plug. Yeah. It hasn't had any problem recently, but anyway, um, the, to me, I think obviously they do a good job. It's just a branding thing, right? It was a brand and my head. It's like, and maybe, you know, is Uber eats and DoorDash trying to become a delivery logistics company in general, outside of food, food or non-food items. Um, obviously they're moving in that direction, but the branding certainly doesn't align.

[00:25:21] So when we, I think that's right, but I think all, I think it's D all of the above that goes with that Tom. And, uh, you know, there's comment here from not sure who this is. It just says LinkedIn user, but, um, the, uh, the fees are making walk away from food delivery. I, I'm the same way is the vast majority of, um, the, um, that just says that, uh, ice cream

[00:25:49] delivery by Uber Eats happens in my house monthly. Well, that's honest, right? And that's good. And if it's only monthly, that sounds great. But, uh, the, um, I, I think I look at it from a standpoint is, is what's imperative. And when you're talking about these things, if someone's on a job site and they want to get something right in Home Depot through their part of his, through their acquisition

[00:26:15] of SRS distribution, uh, last year, plus some other things going on and okay. It looks like that was, I was wondering if that was Brendan Breen and we can't see it on our end, but, uh, Matt's telling us that that was Brendan that made the comment about, uh, the fees that go along with delivery. Cause I don't know why Brendan, we've had this for years now. We never know what's used. So, um, I think that the point about fees is a good point because if I order, I've only

[00:26:44] used Uber Eats a couple of times and we ordered some Mexican food and the food itself was like, $45, but when everything was said and done with fees, tip, all that stuff, it was like close to $75, right? So it was getting close to double. Would that be the situation if it's delivering stuff from Home Depot and other things? Are the fees going to be absurd on top of that as well? Yeah.

[00:27:11] And are they going to expect tips and all the other things that they want to add on to the, to the delivery process? You know, I think this is, let's watch what happens with this. I think is, um, and this to come with me, there's a limit to convenience, but I'm going to, I'm going to share this a little from a different standpoint. Cause I agree. Cause you know what? I, I, I've been, I've probably used those services seven to 10 times at the most. I mean, even the pizza delivery play the pizza place down the hill from our house is, uh,

[00:27:41] they're using a similar app system. Um, yeah, good. It says, uh, ISA is in the house. So that's, that's Brendan Breen, the CEO of the Incognito, the Incognito, uh, the, uh, CEO of the industrial supply association, big event coming up, uh, later this, uh, later this winter, I guess last week of February, Brendan, is that right? Um, in Nashville, the, um, I say summit is always a good event.

[00:28:08] I'm planning on being there again in the supporting that group. So, but I don't know why we just can't see that it's Brendan there, but I assumed it was, but I think, so for me, I look at it as I, I rarely would order food. Someone more than two miles from my house. So it gets good for me to get up out of my chair and go pick up the food. So I'll go, go order. But this is a big difference. There we go. Last week of March. Sorry about that.

[00:28:35] Um, and, uh, in, uh, in Nashville at the Gaylord is the ISA event, which is just a great event. So, um, Brendan, in fact, if you think about it, and this is probably a horrible format for me to do this, but send me a note with a Friday that you're available, uh, before the get you on the, get you on the show to talk about it as well. But, um, let's go back to the more important part of this discussion. Cause we're all talking here about our own personal experience with Uber Eats, right?

[00:29:04] But now put yourself on a job site and you're trying to get a project finished and you need your laser level broke your, um, a particular tool went down and you're trying to get that job done by the end of that day. You're an electrician, you're a plumbing contractor, whatever it might be. Fees are almost irrelevant. Uh, if you need to get something done and get moving on, or you, you have penalties with your project, if you don't have hit a certain time, or you've got an inspector coming by noon that

[00:29:33] day, um, those fees go out the door. And so I think that's the case. You know, what I wanted to reference is there's, but I want to say here before you go any further, right? It sounds like this is more B2C that they're looking at right now with this Home Depot stuff. It's not B2B. It's a mix of that. Yeah. And so, and, and what, stand by because the biggest thing of what they, what, um, well, let's just hit, uh, Darren's and flood Darren's with us.

[00:30:03] Uh, Darren Rosson, uh, great friend and friend of the show. You know, Darren made the comments, a great value prop for small independent contractors spend an extraordinary amount of time running the HD rather than billable hours cost passed on the consumer. So, um, you know, we already have this and I think I'm glad Darren's there. Anybody else that might have used this, there's already an organization, a company out there called Curry, C-U-R-R-I. I think they're actually Santa, either Santa Barbara or Ventura based.

[00:30:30] And they've got what they call Curry hot shots, which is, I'm just on their website right now. Same day, uh, rush or scheduled middle and final mile service. They've got all these different ways of doing it. They can do it all through an app. And this is where I wanted to get to this because the, the folks that were, you know, have most of the wholesale distributors have joined us today are probably not going to want to jump in and try and get involved with Uber Eats or DoorDash and what, what is being done here,

[00:30:58] um, with, um, uh, Home Depot. But that idea of you can't afford to send, you know, if you, you, let's just say you're, uh, you know, a three branch wholesale distributor or however many branches you have, and you have trucks on your truck runs, right? It's very difficult to take and get, you know, five sheets of drywall or, you know, three boxes of nails or whatever it is.

[00:31:26] It's very difficult to bypass that truck for what they're already doing. But Curry's doing some of this. And I think Darren, if you're still there and listening, I think, uh, at your last company, I think you use them for some things, but I don't know if it was for this or not, but we're going to see more and more of what Curry, again, it's just, it's, if you're not familiar with it, it's C-U-R-R-I.com. And, uh, we're going to see more of that popping up that wants to take this on demand.

[00:31:53] And, uh, what do they call, what do they call the Uber drivers? Um, Uber drivers? No, they call them, there's another broader term anyways. I'm sorry, but the broader term is, uh, you know, people that aren't doing this full time, but I could be a guy that's got a pickup truck. You know, the gig workers. Thank you. That's exactly right. So, uh, Duncan was sharing with us there. Exactly. I don't know if he was talking about Curry or, or the broader discussion.

[00:32:21] I want to hit Wes here is that I think this is relevant as well, right? Is the fees will impact the contractor's desire to want to utilize this when most distributors will make the same delivery for free. If contractors embrace this, is this an opportunity? I mean, that's what he's saying. Is this an opportunity for distributors to determine whether or not they need to be able to, you know, continue these hotshot deliveries for free along the way?

[00:32:46] I mean, that's an interesting value add, I guess. Um, exactly. I think the, I think what we're going to see with that, and Wes is a, an executive with, um, uh, DSG and Paul's with us as well. So I like that. Um, the, uh, and Darren's saying here is this is turning into a, I need to call the guys. I met a couple of guys at Curry before at a conference. And, and, uh, I think, and I think.

[00:33:15] You better get them a sponsor. They better do a sponsor. That's like, wait a minute. This is turning into a Curry, a Curry, uh, uh, discussion here. But Darren is saying every distributor who delivers on their own trucks needs to evaluate Curry in that setting. But I think with where Wes is at with that, what we'll probably see. And I think he's even alluding to that, which is a great point. And thank you for that, Wes, is there probably will be a, you know, and we talk about this

[00:33:41] from what we do with, with lead smart and, and our channel cloud, uh, customer intelligence and CRM solution that we didn't really talk about at the beginning of the show, but, you know, with a genius feeds AI solution that we have that is trying to guide a salesperson to what's most important to him is that, um, the, um, with that is we need to get away from where a sales guy is throwing a pump motor into the back of his truck and going out to a job site.

[00:34:08] So if we can make that, you know, last, uh, emergency piece, much more valuable, um, you need a Curry agent, which we're going to talk about later. That's exactly right. Right. But I think the piece that can go with that in this setting is there will be more of these, whether it's a Curry or, you know, I'm just going to throw this out. Paul's here and Wes is here. I think Joe Solheide might be with us from, from a DSG is you might, they might already

[00:34:36] be doing this and others might be, but maybe that using that hotshot term is you have a hotshot immediate delivery service within the company. And for certain types of customers, it's available for free or at a low fee and other types of customers pay a little bit more. The reason that we posted that article today was not is Home Depot going to, or, uh, you know, um, DoorDash is something that every, you know, we're talking about Duncan here in

[00:35:02] the PVF market in, in, uh, Ontario, Canada said that he needs to go out and try and figure out how to get DoorDash to deliver pipes. It's that last mile on that emergency and that rush. That's not really efficient in our business. It might be able to find some efficiencies by some third parties. So my bet is this one's not going to work, but just because of the brand, I just don't think the branding is going to, but Hey, we'll see. So I'm going to challenge you with that.

[00:35:30] And I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I'm going to say that a, um, deeply into the middle age years person like you, uh, is very, very different than the 35 year old that just bought his new home. Right. We talk about that every day about what millennials are doing. That's not my point. Right. My point is there's a lot of options. See, Brandon's with me. Right. Um, is there's a lot of options for this.

[00:36:00] And I really highly respected his opinion previously. Yeah. Right. Do you, did you want to invite him from the show or something? No, no. He can still come on the show and I'm still going to go to his show. But boy, he's agreeing with you that strongly. It's not that I don't think what, what this is needed. And I don't think that it's, it's valuable and people aren't going to want to use it, but you have choices. You have different ways of going.

[00:36:24] I just think the branding for, for something of this magnitude with these size brands, right? They're not going to be satisfied with a little bit here and there. This has to be in their mind, a pretty strategic and large opportunity. And I just, maybe I should rephrase what I said when I said it doesn't work. I don't think it will meet expectations. Okay. Expectations on it. And as a result, you know, it won't probably end up going where they think it's going to go.

[00:36:51] That's my, and I think it'll probably take, you know, six to nine months to, to play out and see if that's, if that's true. Yeah. So I think Tom, to, to, to, to, uh, go along with that is I think that the B2C side, I think it will do fine. Uh, I want to change the, uh, filters in my HVAC system at home on my own, but my son has a soccer game, right? Those types of things. Yeah. Expectations, right?

[00:37:16] We'll see if it, if it, again, the reason we're talking about this today is, and the conversation was great with the people here was a service, regardless of how it's branding that can at an effective price, catch that last mile. That sometimes is a struggle on a rush basis where a distributor's truck isn't trucks aren't anywhere nearby that spot. There's a window for that. Okay. Well, we'll see if there's enough.

[00:37:45] And when I said there's a window for that, there's an app for that. Yeah. Or is there an appetite? There we go. Uh, yeah. So I don't think these companies would have bothered with this if there wasn't an appetite. Oh, no. I mean, clearly they've invested and put stuff in there, but it doesn't mean that it, we'll see if it meets expectation. We'll see. So we were just there in our manufacturing distribution segment. We have another good article there from Digital Commerce 360. I think it was written by our friend Mark Brohan.

[00:38:13] B2B companies prioritize digital technology and cost efficiency. We're going to skip through that. It just talked about comparing European leadership and U.S. leadership about their prioritization of digital. And we might even revisit this one next week, but there's some big stuff to talk about. It's actually a good article, and maybe we should revisit next week or whatever. But I found there were some interesting statistics in there.

[00:38:39] There was a focus on, they were talking about a focus on cost cutting or cost reduction was the word I believe they used in organizations. So using, but using technology to help facilitate those cost reductions, which is what you're hearing, obviously, with all the AI talk is, oh, AI can, you know, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, cost reduction, cost reduction. So they're spending on technology, but their spending is less focused on growth and more

[00:39:08] on cost reduction, at least per what was in the article. Good. Good, good, good. Well, that was, yeah, in fact, I just looked it up. That was from Mark. So that was pretty valuable there. So follow-up article to that as we kind of move into our e-commerce and marketing segment is from marketing professionals or marketingprofs.com. Um, this was pretty cool.

[00:39:32] Um, talking about authenticity within our marketing and what we can do with, with AI and, and so forth, but that we need to continue to be authentic in what we're putting out there. And, uh, you have any thoughts on that particular article? I do. Um, and I'll go quick cause I know we've got a lot still to cover, but I was thinking about this, like, cause basically what they were saying is it's hard to tell in a lot of cases.

[00:39:59] Now, if you were on the phone with an AI chat bot, you wouldn't know necessarily the difference if you were on the phone with an AI chat bot or an individual. So, right. And I was trying to think about, okay, when they use this word authenticity, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean in this sort of age of AI? Yeah, you have a great, great explanation of it. Yeah. But I thought about what I consider authentic.

[00:40:23] And to me, it's when the company is really got that sense of urgency and proactivity, if you will. And I think they even touched on that, right? Proactivity and being proactive, maybe following up or reaching out when I didn't necessarily need it or ask for it. Um, and just kind of overall being thoughtful of the relationship rather than just dealing with the transactional aspect of the relationship.

[00:40:51] And I think that's the, you know, AI can handle the transactional aspect of the relationship, I think is like they were talking about pretty well, but can they go beyond the transactional aspect of the relationship to really kind of put that thoughtfulness in there, whether it's proactivity and sense of urgency and all of that. And to me, that's really what I would consider authentic. I think that's good. Uh, I wouldn't, wouldn't argue with any of those points.

[00:41:18] Um, the, it's going to be interesting to watch this because, and I was, I was having some dialogue this morning, both by text message on LinkedIn with, uh, my friend, uh, Nick Perclay with, uh, profit optics. And we'll talk a little bit about more about some of the cool stuff he's doing. And, uh, we're going to get him on the show sometime soon as well. But we were kind of talking about that a little bit and a big part of what we're going to head into and why you hear the urgency and the rush from Tom to move ahead today is, uh, we're

[00:41:48] going to talk a lot about agents and, and AI agents and so forth. But there is a way to, and this is, um, I think I'm going to get ahead of myself here in that next discussion, but what we're seeing so much here is the rush to, and I think it's what we're seeing early in wholesale distribution is the rush to AI to AI. And it's okay. We're wanting to figure out how we can get this to impact our business, but what the vast

[00:42:16] majority of people, at least, and I'm talking to people every single day as are you. And, and, and, and I'm talking to people that are talking to people, other people every day is the vast majority of the use with chat GPT and other tools like this is asking it questions or maybe asking it to write something for us. That is very different than what we can do with agents as we're going to talk about an agent that can specifically help us with content and brand voice that the agent understands.

[00:42:45] And again, we'll talk about this more in a few minutes, but I think that authenticity piece is having something do some heavy lifting for you that then you augment and support. And even the heavy lifting that it does that understands you and your voice is, is a great tool. And you can maintain that authenticity if you do it correctly and there's steps and guides and so forth into the best way to do that. So, um, yep. Good.

[00:43:15] All right. So diving ahead to, uh, some awkward pause there. We had another article in that segment though, that, uh, we're going to bypass for today. Seven proven strategies for effective B2B customer retention. And that's from martech.com. This is a great point for me to go back and mention and remind everybody that if you're listening on the recorded podcast, uh, Apple, Spotify, Odyssey, wherever it might be, uh, you aren't seeing one of the great comments that we're getting through, uh, from the friends

[00:43:44] that are with us today. And literally we have, I think we've got in a couple of different places. I think we've seen three or four different countries even represented today. And, um, you're not seeing that you're not seeing the articles. We publish our newsletter every week. It's called around the horn and wholesale distribution manufacturing. Three simple ways to get that. If you don't get, you can get talking about it, reading the newsletter.

[00:44:09] If you're a listener on the podcast format, uh, versus our live show is send us an email at hello. I just got one a minute ago. Uh, hello at late smart tech.com with a request for the, be added to the newsletter. Uh, if you're an active LinkedIn, uh, user and you'd like to get news there on LinkedIn, just search around the horn and wholesale distribution. It'll pop right up. It's a spotlight page from the lead smart technologies page that sponsors our show. And you can sign up there.

[00:44:37] It'll come to your LinkedIn feed and your email box every Friday morning, bright and early, or you can go to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and see past episodes, uh, uh, register to get the updates and the newsletter there as well. So good opportunity to do that. The newsletter just keeps getting better and better, uh, each week we've added some segments to it as well. So Tom, we can jump ahead technology, cybersecurity, and AI first article.

[00:45:06] There is that Trump rescinds Biden executive order and AI regulatory overhaul, uh, cybersecurity dive, uh, magazine, uh, excuse me, cybersecurity dive.com published this when you can find this pretty much everywhere. He had said he has a whole plan for AI and Biden had a kind of a, uh, um, I'll just call it a milk toast executive order that he put out about AI probably close to a year ago.

[00:45:34] It almost seemed like that was just something throwing it out there to keep up with what the EU is working on. That's what we said a year ago, right? We talked about this as it was sort of like, Hey, I'm doing something about it. Look, we're doing something about it. As I said at the time, it was stupid because it really didn't, it just didn't have any about it. Well, I said at the time, right. I said it was stupid. Um, and, and I think, you know, that's exactly what Trump and the team believe as well is

[00:46:04] I don't know that really had any impact one way or the other. I just think they're trying to get stuff out of the way and removing some of the noise and it was just kind of noisy. Um, and you know, let's remove some of these, I'm not going to use the word out of date. I just don't think they're relevant things at this point because we're still sorting things out and try to add extra complications to things and let's get on with it.

[00:46:31] And, you know, then as things develop, then we can determine what are the really the correct regulations. So I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. And although I do think there's a lot of state, you know, state specific regulations that may occur. And I think the states have to be, I could totally see California coming in with a bunch of regulatory things on this, but then that's just going to drive out innovation potentially in your, in your state.

[00:46:57] So you've got to be cognizant of what you're, what you're doing with some of these regulations. Well, the, the thought leaders in this field are in California. Yeah. Right. And, and many of them are billionaires. Uh, what I think it's interesting, and this just goes back to kind of how we started the day to day about talking to you about, you know, things don't need to be the norm like they've always been. And, and now you've got David Sachs, who was, uh, going to be, I can't remember what

[00:47:27] his title is, but he has a title as an advisor to the administration on AI and crypto and these pieces. And this is a guy that makes his living every day, day in and day out. That's leading a consortium of people to advise the government. So it's not a bunch of rule makers and legislators who come from, you know, the middle of the country or it doesn't matter where they're from, but just whether they're, they're knowledgeable or not.

[00:47:52] And now we've got this group, of course, you know, uh, uh, Elon Musk has Trump's ear. He's going to weigh in on these things, but you've got David Sachs leading this group. And just from a credibility standpoint, you know, David leads in, in owns one of the top, uh, uh, venture capital and investment groups for early and mid stage technology companies. So he has teams and teams of people that are staying on top of this and advising him.

[00:48:21] So to, to tell you where he made his money is PayPal is where it started. He was the original, I believe chief operating officer at PayPal. Um, that's where the big dollars came from. First hit when he left there, he started a little company called Yammer. That was a communication tool that Microsoft bought for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So now getting these people in to advise the, um, the administration on some of these things,

[00:48:48] I think we're going to come out of this with something in a document, whether they're rules or their orders, but they're going to have some guardrails to them that are, and I'm not suggesting that president Biden didn't have some good advisors. But I think what we're seeing is the people that are in the trenches every day are now more involved than political related people. And I don't think anyone's saying, Hey, wild, wild west, forget any sort of, absolutely not. There's guardrails. I think they're just looking at how do we remove some of the red tape?

[00:49:19] How do we remove some of the things that potentially just make add friction for no other better, better word. And then, but at the same time, let's obviously evaluate what it is as we go forward. And I think that executive order, it was, it was not very clear. Number one, it was a bit very ambiguous. It just added friction and confusion versus actually solving anything. So I'm not surprised, but.

[00:49:45] Well, let's then let's just jump to our next article and then we'll come there. We're going to get in. And what's going to take probably the rest of our show today, which is CBS had on their Money Watch segment. This is just the one we posted. You could see this every anywhere about the $500 billion Stargate AI venture. Open AI SoftBank and Oracle on Tuesday came together to talk about putting together the future of technology in the US. Yeah.

[00:50:13] I don't know if you've dug into this a little bit or we want to dig into it a little bit, but I think it's worth taking a couple of minutes to talk about is so, and I've been doing, because when I saw this, it was like, okay, what's actually going on here? You know, talk about the story behind the story. So what they're doing is SoftBank, which is a Japanese investment firm, is investing minimally hundreds of billions, right?

[00:50:40] Up to 500 billion over the period of time to help Oracle and OpenAI. But let's just say Oracle from the hardware perspective and from the infrastructure perspective, build out data centers across the US that will then be operated and run by OpenAI personnel for AI purposes, okay?

[00:51:06] And it's not clear exactly what applications will be run through there. I know there was some things like health research and other things like that that would run through these, you know, large, large infrastructure for data or for across the country. I was intrigued by why Trump was supporting it and he was pushing, hey, there's going to be a lot of jobs that are opening up and all of that.

[00:51:31] But when you get right down to it, the only people who have access to use these data centers when they're up and running is OpenAI. So it's not going to be broader. It's not going to be broader than that. No, it's only OpenAI. That's what was, it's not like, okay, now there's this whole infrastructure and we can all tap into it and we can all, all of our companies leverage it. OpenAI is the only one who has, at least at this point, access to these data or will have access to,

[00:52:01] they will operate and have access to these data centers. So, no, there's, why I tend to agree with building out infrastructure is good. They don't talk at all about the energy aspect of it. There's nothing in there on how these are all going to be powered and all of that kind of stuff. And I also question, is this a distraction for OpenAI? You know, OpenAI is job, I know they have different charters, but they're building out,

[00:52:30] obviously we're going to talk about this more in just a minute, their technology infrastructure and their technology running a whole framework and operating a whole based around what this is. That's a, is that a distraction, right? Because that's not exactly the same core that the core focus that they're doing right now. Yeah, they're going to need those data centers that are so much more relying on other people right now with that. So, could be another part of the organization.

[00:52:58] I want to jump on to more important stuff than the, the, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the founder, uh, with his team of OpenAI and ChatGPT. Uh, I thought it was interesting in this, with this whole Stargate thing, which is, I think exciting, uh, of what the potential of it is.

[00:53:28] And it's something that we'll pay attention to and watch is that, you know, Elon Musk came out and said that SoftBank doesn't even have the money to do this. And, uh, you know, they're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. And he said, they don't have available 10 billion for something like this. And then there was all kinds of rocks thrown at him. So there's a little bit of a, of a gamesmanship going on in some of these things, but my, and our, I think our role here is to focus on how will these things benefit wholesale distribution and manufacturing in the economy.

[00:53:58] And we'll keep a close eye on this, which is what we try and do every week, which is why I think, uh, some people come to join us on a consistent basis and a growing audience each week. And I don't know that there'll be any benefit to manufacturers and wholesale distributions. Well, there will be, I think, because there will be more AI tools that will come out of this. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think there's any, I don't think if this moves ahead, there's no way that this doesn't improve, uh, capabilities to grow and benefit, uh, the growth of AI.

[00:54:26] So, um, I think that we'll see what happens. I mean, maybe the, the, you know, rising tide benefits all right. Is the infrastructure improves, then that may very well have a lot of global or, or, or, certainly national impact on some of our things. And then the bigger picture, if we were to take this fully downstream is all of this impacts the wholesale distributors and manufacturers that are with us each week here on the show, because guess what? Every one of those data centers needs wire.

[00:54:56] It needs roofing materials. I agree with you there. Yeah. It needs everything. And at the end of the day, what should come out of this as well though is better AI tools that will allow companies like lead smart technologies to enhance our channel cloud.ai products and the things that we're building and working on now that will directly impact wholesale distribution. So every distributor should enter this as an opportunity in their, in their CRM because

[00:55:24] there you go for their local thing. Brian, who's a technology executive that I highly respect. He says, seems myopic to only host open AI. I'd agree. This is a story that has a lot more chapters ahead of it. So I would agree with you there. Yeah. Let's move ahead to open AI launches operator and AI agent that performs tasks autonomously.

[00:55:51] We've been talking about this of the future for at least a year on this show. We've been trying to work and build some of this into the technology that you and I work on every day. We've got the earliest phases of this already in lead smart channel cloud of, of guidance and directions, but the opportunities are come out of this operator from open AI that they've launched. Nobody has anything else like it yet. Got a lot to talk about and share for this.

[00:56:20] So Tom, why don't you, and you could, you, if you're listening on the podcast, you don't need to look at tech crunch where that we have up on the screen here, this article, but go ahead and just search open, open AI operator anywhere. And you'll get a bunch of feedback on this, but this, this is exciting. And this is moving us in the direction that we need to go. So you want to give us the overview of it? Yeah.

[00:56:48] So it's a platform for, I'm going to call it consumer centric agents. You can tell it. And again, you have to have the $200 one for now. So it's not available to all of them. Let me interrupt you. And I apologize for doing that too, but I think it's important for our audience in particular. We're going to talk a ton about agents. Let's talk about, and we have these conversations if you're a chat GPT user about, you know, having a GPT.

[00:57:17] And then sometimes we talk about agents and we talk about AI and what AI will do. Why don't you boil down for us briefly? What is an agent? And that'll set the stage for our discussion. Sure. I guess the simple answer is it's an AI based application that has some sort of specific goal or outcome that it's designed to achieve. Right. And it's either designed to achieve that either autonomously on its own or with, you know, some level of interaction from you.

[00:57:48] So rather than a chat bot that goes in and creates a blog post and you're going through and interactively going through that process, you would have an agent that you would tell it what to do, whatever that may be. It then operates on that goal, right? Because what you told it to do is its goal and its job is to go achieve that outcome using is, and that AI may have multiple different steps to it to achieve that outcome. So sources and other agents and so forth, right?

[00:58:18] And let me boil down. I'm sorry, Tom, repeat that. I interrupted you. I apologize. There are just multiple checkpoints and conditions, conditional steps along the way. So we're going to look at some particular use cases. We have an image that a friend had done this morning that he posted to LinkedIn. I'm going to give a simple example of one that you're not even aware of that I started working on early this morning. So I started working on in just using ChatGPT.

[00:58:42] It requires the paid version to be able to, which is $20 a month to build agents. We review and read these articles that we go through every week. I have every intention of continuing to curate and read these articles. But there's a lot of facts and details in these articles that are hard to remember when it comes time. So I started building an agent that would run each week.

[00:59:09] And the articles that we have can simply put the links to those in a spreadsheet and ask that it's going to go through one by one of each of those articles and deliver to me at 730 a.m. A recap of the articles with the statistics and graphs and things that I need. I started building that this morning.

[00:59:34] So now I can take, again, augmenting my own personal use and the authenticity. I can review the articles when I decide what we're going to post each week, get my own personal take. And now this agent is going to go review them all to bring me some very specific things that I can use in the last step of my preparation for the show. And it automates the whole process for me. So simple agent, right? Yeah. Good example of an agent. Yeah.

[01:00:03] It's a good example. And for a beer, I'll share it with you. Okay. I know you're our agent guru, so. No, no, no. I'm trying to use them. I'm building other agents right now. It's something we haven't even talked about at depth, but we have some hiring to do coming up. And I'm starting to build some agents for what each one of those jobs looks like. Okay. I've got some marketing agents built. And all of these things are what they're trying to do is what we commented last week

[01:00:33] in our special show with the legends that we had. We just talked about the idea of Jensen Huang at NVIDIA has said that eventually 100% of us, 50% of our job will be done by agents. If I can have agents help me do a better job at the podcast, it's to everybody's benefit. If I can have an agent that helps a new employee understand how to do their job better, everybody wins and I need fewer employees. Right. Right.

[01:01:01] But let's, let's go back to operator because that's kind of the. Well, so let's go back to that now that you helped us with what agents are and that sets the context. Yeah. So open AI announced this new product called operator. You can't, most of us can't get to it unless you have the $200 version. But basically, and I know you've even probably gotten more insights on how this works than I have so far, but basically you can go into it. And give it a request, right.

[01:01:30] To an agent, maybe it's a travel request or a restaurant request or something like that. And it will go through the process based on your request and achieve that outcome. Right. So if it's find the best restaurant in Philadelphia and book me a reservation, or it's, you know, look through all the top restaurants and find the ones that have availability at six in the evening or whatever, and whatever the case may be. I know you have some specific examples you've been going through. Yeah.

[01:01:57] But, but what's intriguing about this, and this is something that technically, technically the way that we all think about historically, we think about interacting with other applications is through APIs, right? Application programming interface, where I, my code talks to your code and we send information back from there. The operator doesn't work that way.

[01:02:23] The operator uses visual AI to look at the websites that it's going to navigate through and decide based on the visuals that it's seen of the website, just like you would, if you went to a website, what actions it should take to then navigate through the process of accomplishing the goal that's there. It's not using any AI, I'm sorry, API related construct is just using AI and visual AI to

[01:02:52] actually do all the steps that it works through. And APIs break and, and struggle sometimes, which says it looks like a great use of the other technology, right? There's so much to unpack with this that we don't have time about today. I mean, we were talking, I think before the show, if this is the future, and I'm not a hundred percent convinced that it is, but I'm not convinced that it isn't either.

[01:03:19] If this is the, if this is the future of integration, if you want to call that, or at least, um, you know, dealing with multiple applications, then what does that do to make your website more friendly to be able to deal with those things? Like they were talking about, it runs into issues with CAPTCHA and all the kind of crap that we all run into, right? You have to make sure you're a human. Right. To make sure you're human, but you're not a human in this case, right? No. Right.

[01:03:46] And it's my, it's my, it's my agent acting on my behalf. Exactly. Right. Right. It's not a malicious thing when I'm trying to, which you're, yeah. And you know, there's also issues that you could spoof the AI based on the data that's on the website that it sees. So from a security standpoint, it could end up going off into some weird directions. As a result of that. So there's just a lot of, and I'll just say one last thing.

[01:04:12] And then is that the way that this works also is when you make the request, open AI opens a separate web browser and then shows you step by step in that separate web browser, the steps that it's taking to go through the process to achieve the goal or the outcome that you're, that you're looking for. So two factors though, because let's stick with why we're here, right? Wholesale distributors and manufacturers and talking about things that impact them.

[01:04:39] This could, as this catches on now, we are moving in. I don't think anybody can argue. We are moving into a world where we will have agents that help us in our day-to-day life. And just the simplest thing of thinking about that is an artificial intelligence tool that knows and understands you, knows your likes and dislikes, knows the tone of how you talk, knows your American Airlines or Delta Airlines frequent flyer number, and can help you with

[01:05:08] mundane tasks to move you to a place where you can be much more efficient in your life and value the important things. Some people will use agents so they don't have to work as much and work a 25-hour week versus a 40-hour week. Some people will use agents to continue to work a 60-hour week, but the things that they're focused on in their 60-hour week are super high value things that they'll be doing in their life.

[01:05:34] Some of the things I described earlier that I'm working on with agents right now is not changing how many hours I'm going to work a week. It's changing what I do and the things that I do that are mundane happen fast or for me. And I focus on the high-end, high-value things that can happen in my life. Now, and part of it is, you know, I like to use the term drinking my own champagne versus eating my own dog food. But it's what we do in our company.

[01:06:03] I was talking to some folks earlier in the week in the private equity world, and they were astounded what we've accomplished in our company with a smaller team. Just because we use these things, you can do more with less. But I think the reality of this is there's two sides to it. One is the value that will come from that. But as a wholesale distributor, what I need to be thinking about is my customer, Tom, we should do just a separate episode that we just record and make available talking about these.

[01:06:31] Because we talked about this over lunch on Tuesday together about you have a friend that's an electrical contractor. And he wants to start doing these things in his business. And he has what? He's not a small guy. He has probably 15, 20 trucks or whatever it is out there. So he's an impactful customer for an electrical distributor. He told you the three electrical or four electrical distributors he buys from and where he struggles with on their things on their websites and doing business with them.

[01:06:59] And so this is going to migrate over there. And if I'm a wholesale distributor, I don't need to make change tomorrow. But I need to be understanding what's happening with these things and how my buyer might want to start using these tools. If I'm a manufacturer, I should probably be thinking about are my distributors wanting to do more with these things as well? So let's talk about a couple of use cases. I'm going to just go back to my talk about my friend Nick Paraclay this morning. His LinkedIn post. Nick's a real smart guy. I think he's with us today.

[01:07:29] So I had to give him the good compliment. But he made a post because he started using this today, early this morning. Tom, do you have that screenshot? He wanted to just test it and know if it could make a reservation for him at a top restaurant. He lives in the Richmond, Virginia area. So this is a little bit if you're looking at it. But his question was, find a really good restaurant in Richmond, Virginia for next Friday at 7 p.m. for my anniversary.

[01:07:57] So there's a smart guy. And that is one going to bring making his relationship and his appreciation from his wife right into testing AI. So this says it's steps that it worked on. And it took it three minutes, which is crazy. No one wants to wait. So we're early stages this, but it says searching for anniversary restaurants in Virginia, in Richmond, I should say. Exploring results. Exploring top restaurants.

[01:08:26] And it takes him through all these. And it says clicking on La Opossum details. Checking on La Opossum. There's a Virginia joke with possum in a French restaurant name that's there somewhere. But it goes through checking the dates. And then it brings him to a TripAdvisor screen about another restaurant called Stella's. Taking this back is we will be at a point in the not too distant future.

[01:08:54] Tom, you might speak better to the time frame. I think we're very, very close. Where you will just talk to your agent. And you'll have many agents for different facets of your life that will go do these things. So this was from Nick's LinkedIn post. If you're looking at it and seeing it, he said I could share this. I responded to his LinkedIn post that said what I'm anticipating next and soon from this is

[01:09:22] that I can, with an out walking my dog or walking through an airport, or it can be Saturday doing chores. I will be able to talk to my agent that's going through my phone and say, reach out to, and this would be all done by the agent, find out on my trip to Richmond next week. I'd like to have dinner with Nick and his lovely wife.

[01:09:50] Check for any new Michelin chefs or the hottest restaurant in Richmond because I'd like to take them there. If their schedules are tight and I need to change my hotel or any of my other travel, go ahead and do that. Now that agent was just going to take off because Nick and I are friends. We would have already agreed that our agents can talk to each other. Nick's agent is talking to his wife's agent and can take this step.

[01:10:19] And when I talk to Nick, we don't have to talk about anything else about looking at our calendars and availability. We already have a reservation at what it says here, Stella's. My flight got moved back to the next morning with an extra night of hotel and car because I want to have dinner with Nick and his wife. All that stuff is done. And the important piece out of this, Tom, is what it does is it takes the phone call that I have scheduled for a week from Monday with Nick, I think it is.

[01:10:48] We're talking about high level, high value things that are important to us. We took the 10 minutes of discussion of where do you want to have dinner? Is your wife available? Let me text her. Let's see if we can get a reservation. It's done. That's behind us. And so now take this into a buying experience of a contractor with a wholesale distributor, some pretty cool stuff coming. Well stated. I couldn't agree more.

[01:11:14] And I think obviously, I think you even said he ran into some issues with this. Yeah, this is a big problem. This is a big problem. But you can see, right, with the website over here and these websites that it's navigating through, let's face it, there's a lot of places where using the website and the visual recognition, it can conk out. So I'm not going to be surprised, but that's not the point, right? The point is, I keep talking about this. I think I talked about it last week, right? The killer app.

[01:11:43] We have not seen, I'll just use it in wholesale distribution yet. We have not seen the killer app with AI. This now translated into actual B2B, and I'm not saying that travel is not an important part of B2B, but just B2B actions. You start to think about it, this will be the killer app. We haven't seen it yet, so it's not top of mind.

[01:12:12] And I'm hoping that this type of thing, as people start to see it, and they start to, and I'm impressed, Kevin, with your creativity, right, with looking at how to use agents. That's exactly what we have to be doing as businesses. We have to creatively, easy for me to say, creatively, I'll just stop by. Creatively. We have to creatively come up with all kinds of these use cases that we normally, it's like, wouldn't even think about before,

[01:12:41] because it was just like, this is how I do things. But the AI will help us do that by literally asking it to ask us questions. And none of this is meant to be like, oh my gosh, you know, the world is coming to an end, and you know, it's just going to take over our lives. The idea behind this is make our lives better. And as professionals in the wholesale distribution manufacturing and then us in the technology world is, we need to pick what we want to do that is going to work best for us.

[01:13:10] But the reality of it is, is we all need to be prepared for our customers wanting to use these things. And we need to all raise our game, however we're going to use these. I anticipate that I'm going to have probably 10 to 20 agents in my life in the next five to seven years, not five, seven years, probably 12 to 18 months. So I think it might be a lot more than that, but. Okay. Well, I already have them. I mean, they're, they're not as automated.

[01:13:39] I mean, I already have three or four of them that are helping me do my job dramatically faster. And I've got a list of about, I already have a list of six or eight more that I want to build in the next month or two that will impact the growth of our company. All right. Well, we've talked a lot about that. I think it's exciting. Another article here, three ways augmented reality will shape manufacturing from industrial distribution. Great article in our sales and M&A segment today. We're going to kind of wrap up here, but we've got a couple of pieces there.

[01:14:07] And then in our people and leadership segment that we do each week, six best practices for engaging younger employees in supply chains. Uh, there's some issues there about exempt status of salespeople and distribution, uh, that the Supreme court weighed in on this week. That's an article for MDM while we're taking a look at. And then on top of that, we've got, uh, there's an article there about us employee engagement falls to 10 year low with some statistics, an idea about improving that that's from HR dive.

[01:14:37] So that's a good one. And then, uh, in our channel, I just wanted to hit real quick that that second article in particular about the best practices. I found really interesting if we hadn't time on another day, there's a lot to unpack in there about that. And this was very appropriate to manufacturing wholesale distribution. So, no, and I think from that, maybe this is a good one that we leave in for next week. We'll unpack it a little bit. Um, so let's jump in the channel leaders on the move segment.

[01:15:06] That's a new segment that we just recently added. Only one I want to mention is our friend, Tom Gale from MDM. Tom's great guy, good friend. Uh, he just joined the board of stellar industrials, a board of directors. So that's kind of a neat thing for him. So congratulations to Tom in that setting. And then let's just, uh, kind of wind us down for the day, Tom. There's some industry scuttlebutt things. Only piece in there that, uh, is a bit of, uh, worth talking about right now in the,

[01:15:32] the, um, short time we have is that there's a big issue within Amazon about hazardous products and so forth. And they've been officially by the U S government, a final order that references and shows them as a distributor. So some of the things that they've been able to dance around as an e-commerce player, third party provider, uh, is, does not impact them in the same way anymore because of what they've been designated at now that they have to play the game a little bit closer to what

[01:16:02] others have to do. So anyways, let's kind of wind down. I think that's it for the newsletter for today. There's a, there's a, here's a big replay link there too. That's right. There's a link in the newsletter to last week's show with Mike Marks, Ian Heller, and Dirk beverage. Um, loved having them here, uh, that reinforced some of the stuff that we were talking about. So we appreciate everybody today that was with us. Some great comments from some first time, uh, comments from some long time listeners,

[01:16:28] I think today, which we love seeing, uh, Thomas is good, but action packed. Um, love doing this each week again. I'm Kevin Brown. This is Tom Burton. Um, what we didn't, I didn't fail to mention the beginning of the show. The only way we're able to do this every week is that the company that Tom and I work for lead smart technology covers all the costs that goes with this. Uh, we've got an editor that manages all of this and another marketing person that handles a lot of this for us. And that's on our team.

[01:16:56] And, uh, there's a lot that goes into this. So we couldn't do that. What lead smart does. I didn't talk much about lead smart. Lead smart is a, uh, we've developed the channel cloud AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence solution and platform. And what that does is it's far different than what most people think about when they think about CRM, what we do with lead smart and the channel cloud product is we connect to, uh, what we call silo data around organizations, the ERP data, the marketing automation, e-commerce

[01:17:26] data, other silo data that just sits out there and we never use for good things. We use AI tools to bring all of that together, look across an organization, across our teams to gain deep insights to what's happening at the customer. What's happening on our sales teams and our branches and locations are inside teams and gives us deep insights, not just to our customer, but our teams and our overall business. We have tools built into that, like our genius feed system, which brings alerts to salespeople

[01:17:55] and even executives about where it's best to spend our time and what should we be selling to who and how should we be following up on things. So we're super efficient. The world is changing fast. So if we're thinking that CRM is a place that, uh, salespeople type some notes in about what they've been doing, that was your, your father's Buick is the old ad says, uh, the things that we can do with the CRM on a platform versus a CRM product across an organization has never been greater.

[01:18:24] And what we're doing at lead smart is we're incorporating all the types of things from AI that we've been talking about today into those solutions to help wholesale distributors and manufacturers grow. So if you're thinking about growth, accelerated growth within your business and have some goals, getting the right technology behind you is the thing to do. And we can support you in that. So that's our plug for the day. Tom, I wish you a great weekend. We'll talk more later today. And again, thank you to Wes and Duncan and Darren and Paul and Brian and all the folks

[01:18:54] who are coming today. I'm missing more than half of them, but we appreciate your involvement. And if you like what we do, the best thing you can do for us besides coming back each week is forward that newsletter that we do out to friends and colleagues that you have in your business. Follow us on LinkedIn live, YouTube live, Facebook live, wherever you're listening. And if you're listening in on the podcast, leave a review because the more people that we get this out in front of, the better it is for everybody. So that's it for us today, huh? Yep. Sounds good.

[01:19:24] Have a good weekend, everyone. See you next week. All the best. Be kind, be good, be safe and do good things. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests. Each week, we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business. So please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about more often and even guests you'd like to see join us.

[01:19:53] We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then, you stay safe, stay focused and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review to help others in wholesale distribution get access to the conversation. And finally, please check out our sponsor Lead Smart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform.

[01:20:22] That's Lead Smart Technologies at leadsmarttech.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening.